Rorschach is a fictional superhero who is a central character in the classic comic book series, Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and published by DC Comics. He is a modified version of the character The Question, created by Steve Ditko and based on the absolutist philosophy of Ayn Rand.
His real name is Walter Joseph Kovacs, the son of a prostitute who felt he interfered in her business and abused him viciously. At the age of 10, he was cruelly abused by two bullies. After he attacked them, partially blinding one with a lit cigarette, he was made a ward of the state. In high school, he excelled in religious education and literature, as well as in boxing and gymnastics. He also wrote an essay for a homework assignment in which he praised President Truman's decision to use nuclear weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, asserting that the bombs helped save lives by stopping the war.
During those high school years, Walter was told of his mother's death. She was murdered in a particularly gruesome fashion by her pimp, being force-fed a bottle of Drāno until she died in agony. Walter's only reaction consisted of the single word: "Good".
Reaching maturity, he found work as a garment worker and was later fascinated by a new garment created by Doctor Manhattan with special interior dark liquid masses that continually change into symmetrical patterns like a Rorschach test. When he learned of the death of Kitty Genovese - implicitly the customer who had ordered the garment - who was brutally murdered in front of a building full of tenants who didn't bother to help her, he modified the cloth as a mask to become Rorschach to lash out against such criminals.
Eventually, he teamed up with another superhero, Nite Owl (II), in a close association in which Rorschach's natural investigation skills were complemented by his partner's technical skills and resources.
In the 1970s, Rorschach was hunting for a kidnapped girl, and found her captor's hideout. To his horror, he realized that the girl had been murdered and fed to two German Shepherd dogs. In the face of this atrocity, Kovac's mind snapped and assumed the mental identity of Rorschach as a separate personality. With that change, he killed the dogs and later murdered the kidnapper, tying him up in his empty house and burning him alive.
With that, Rorschach terrorized criminals on his own and was an apocalyptic picketter during the day. He grew even more violent: when freelance masked vigilantes were outlawed, he murdered a notorious rapist and pinned a note on the body saying "Never!" before he dumped it front of a police station.
In the mid 1980s, he investigated a murder and discovered that the victim was the Comedian, a miscreant superhero he admired. Suspecting a plot to eliminate superheroes, he pursued the case based on that theory and interviewed the various informal members of the hero community. Although they did not take his theory seriously, the sudden public denunciations and subsequent self-exile of Dr. Manhattan and the attempted murder of Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias, bolstered his confidence that he was on the right track. Eventually, he was framed for the murder of an old retired supervillain, and arrested.
In prison, Rorschach was subject to numerous death threats and attacks by vengeful prisoners, until he was freed by Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, who sought his help in their own investigation.
Eventually, they learned that the mastermind behind the plot was Adrian Veidt, and Rorschach and Nite Owl traveled to his home in Antarctica to confront him; however, they were unable to prevent him from faking the disastrous appearance in New York City of a giant Lovecraftian monster, killing millions and - as planned - uniting the world and thereby avoiding nuclear war.
Faced with the fact that exposing this crime could lead to worse world devastation, the other superheroes agreed to keep silent about it. Rorschach, on the other hand, refused on principle to cooperate ("No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.") and was disintegrated by Dr. Manhattan at his own goading.
However, his legacy may have greater consequences. This is because prior to going to Antarctica, he wrote a complete journal about his investigation and sent it to a reactionary fringe newspaper. Whether or not the journal's contents would be printed and taken seriously by the public was left as an open question at the very last page of the Watchmen comics series.
